Facebook has launched two new APIs to track and integrate conversations into news coverage. According to the AllFacebook blog, the two APIs include: “the public feed API, which displays a real-time feed of public posts for a specific word; and the keyword insights API, which tallies the total number of posts that mention a specific term during a specific time period, as well as enabling news organization to feature anonymous, aggregated results based on gender, age, and location.”

These new features are additional arsenal in Facebook’s competitive battle with Twitter. As described on Facebook’s Newsroom blog: “Over the past few months, we have rolled out a series of products aimed at surfacing the public conversations happening on Facebook including hashtags, embedded posts, and trending topics. We are committed to building features that improve the experience of discovering and participating in conversations about things happening in the world right now, including entertainment, sports, politics and news.”

The APIs currently are available to only a few media companies but Facebook says they are “beginning discussions with other media partners and preferred marketing developers (PMD’s) and will make it available to additional partners in the coming weeks.”

You can imagine that the new APIs will be mostly useful to national media organizations who are covering topics that impact a larger group of users. But a big local news item — disasters, college or professional sports teams, salacious trials — could also generate enough conversation that local publishers could meaningfully tap into.